Math Week 4: Mira, Mira, on the Wall!

In math this week, I learned what miras are!  No matter how exciting these tools were, though, it was incredibly sad to be reminded of all the math tools are stuck in closets, not being used.  And thus, I made a mental note and vow to always search the school for stuff before purchasing it.  I guess you could call this my personal school budget plan.

I also learned today that purposeful group work is very different than just working with other people.  Group work needs to be engaging and be a beneficial learning experience for all the group members to make it worthwhile.  Group roles are an excellent way to accomplish this.  Yet, the thing to remember is that group roles need to be monitored and upheld by the teacher, otherwise the students won't adhere to them. 

Even though a specific structure to group work might allow for greater learning opportunities, some part of me wants to think that all group work has benefit to it. Not only does it help kids learn how to interact with another person or people, it also then teaches accountability (when you do activities such as partner sharing and being held accountable for your group's work).  So, do all group work activities truly need to meet the "group worthy" criteria?  Or can group work sometimes just be about teaching students how to interact and resolve disputes?

Literacy Project 1: Writing Analysis and Lesson Plan

Overview

D (abbreviated for confidentiality) is an enthusiastic 4^th grade learner.  His passions are math and science, although he says he also enjoys reading mysteries and other stories that make him think.  An analysis of D’s writing and spelling follows.

Analysis

Meaning of the piece:

In the piece of writing I analyzed, the author is responding to a prompt about a talking pet.  Even though this writing was initiated via a prompt, it would appear from D’s enthusiasm that he enjoyed writing this piece.  D chose to write about a talking parrot because he loves birds.  He wanted to convey to the reader a sense of adventure and suspense through his development of the story and share his love and amazement of birds with the reader.

Six Traits:

Ideas:

In this piece of writing, the topic is fairly broad since it is a “bed-to-bed” story, spanning the length of one day.  However, you can definitely tell that the author has chosen this duration because of the nature of the prompt (one day with a talking pet).  The author did stay with his topic and only included main points and details related to his interactions with the talking pet, which makes the story focused, even though it deals with a broad topic. 

The author also does a consistent job providing details to support his main ideas.  For example, the author writes that he was walking too slowly for his pet parrot, so the parrot picked him up and flew him around to save time.  The rest of the story is filled with details chronicling the day’s adventures.

Organization:

One of D’s strongest elements in his writing is his organization.  He has a clear and provocative opening paragraph and a paragraph to conclude the story.  From the first sentence, the reader wants to hear what happens next.  D writes, “I was sleeping all cozy and warm, when I heard a noise under my bed.”  D takes his time to setup the characters and setting of the story in the first paragraph before transitioning to more action-oriented scenes in the body of the story. 

In conjunction with a solid introduction and conclusion, D makes an appropriate choice in paragraph breaks and structure to suit the purpose and audience of the story.  He uses transition words such as “finally” to make paragraph transitions smooth and chose to break the paragraphs at points related to shifts in time and content.  D’s organization makes the story flow well and very understandable.

Voice:

D takes a risk with his choice of voice, using a very conversation tone with phrases that D uses in his own daily conversations.  Through reading this piece, the reader can tell when D is annoyed, “I said no way Jose!” and when the D is yelling, “I said PUT ME DOWN”.  Through his voice, D reflects himself in his writing.  D chose to write in the first-person so that the reader can follow the author’s adventures with his talking parrot throughout the whole day. 

D provides personifying details about the parrot and includes many action-oriented descriptions that make the reader become engaged in the story.  D stays focused on the topic, chooses interesting details to include, and writes with his own natural and engaging language. 

Word Choice

Looking at D’s 1^st draft compared with his final draft, a reader can see that D attempted to insert colorful language to provide more vivid descriptions in the story.  However, although the word choice it at the right level, it sometimes seems out of place.  For example, D writes, “There we were at the cheerful kitchen.”  D added in “cheerful” to help us visualize the appearance of the kitchen, but this descriptive word seems out of place and perhaps unnecessary to enhance the story. 

In conjunction with D’s choice of voice, the word choice remains very basic and is full of conversational phrases.  For example, D writes, “He just drop me on my bottom hard”.  There are only a few fine moments where the author’s word choice enhances the story.  For instance, “My parrot refused me” gives the reader a clear image of the parrot being demanding and stubborn.

Sentence Fluency

While D consistently includes smooth transitions between paragraphs (see Organization) he does not always include transitional words that would assist the reader in knowing how sentences interrelate.  When reading his own story out loud, D’s verbal expressions helped the listener understand the sequence and flow of the story.  However, upon reading the story without D, the reader questions how some sentences relate.  For example, D writes, “When he [the parrot] was carring me I saw the stairs.  I thought there was no way he’d carry me down the stairs, and he didn’t.”  The sequence of events in this quote make sense.  However, the choice of sentence breaks and lack of transitions makes the meaning of the sentences difficult to understand.

In this narrative, D often uses the word “I” to begin sentences since the story is about all of the actions and feelings that he is experiencing.  However, he does use the occasional transition word such as “So”, “Then”, and “Finally”.   Through the revision process, it appears that D inserted some varied vocabulary to begin sentences, although most of his sentence beginnings remain repetitive.

Conventions

In this writing piece, D struggles with many errors in grammar that affect the meaning of his story.  Most commonly, D switches between the past and present tense and inserts unnecessary or omits necessary verbs for creation of a complete sentence.  Here are a few writing samples that demonstrate these errors:

“I scream!  I was afraid he is going to drop me…” 

“I decided that better get him some food soon.”  

“We headed toward the kitchen and that’s was my day began the day all animals could talk.”

From talking with D, it sounds like leaving off the “ed” at the end of words happens in speech and reading.  Thus, this error is carried into his writing.  In analyzing the symbiotic relationship between speech and written language, Cambourne writes about how the natural development of speech translates into written language (p. 28).  Thus, this relationship in literacy development may be the reason behind D’s grammatical errors.  If these verb errors are stemming from D’s speech, making the necessary changes so that his writing is grammatically correct will be very challenging.

In terms of punctuation, D consistently shows appropriate beginning and ending punctuation.  However, his comma and quotation usage are lacking or incorrect.  This sometimes affects the fluency and interpretation for a reader.  For example, D writes, “He [my parrot] was jumping on my face and said, get up.  It’s time for breakfast.”  In this example, the lack of quotation marks makes it hard to distinguish narration from dialogue.  However, with moderate editing, this text would read smoothly and be ready for publication.

Ownership of writing:

D shows that he has ownership of his writing in a few different ways.  First, he chose his own details to suit his interests, like a parrot and flying.  Also, he used his own voice and expressions to show that it was really him in the story.  D was proud to share his story with me as well as show me the illustration that he did to accompany his story.  He is very motivated to do his work, which includes spelling, writing, reading, and other subjects and is proud of his accomplishments, even if he doesn’t receive very high grades.  Finally, D is very willing to do a lot of revising before writing his final draft, which shows that he is able and willing to manipulate his work with a purpose.

Spelling Development:

It seems that D does not hear or speak words accurately all of the time.  It seems that this is impacting his spelling mostly by the fact that he often leaves off or unnecessarily adds suffixes to words (most frequently “ed”).  For example, he spelled fortunate “forchened” and confident “confinded”.  In his writing piece, he wrote “I was freak out!” even though the expression either requires an “ed” or “ing” at the end of “freak”.  Because this error remained unchanged between his rough and final drafts, I don’t think D knows that he is saying the expression incorrectly.  This kind of mispronunciation is extending itself to both spelling and reading other words as well as resulting in past- and present-tense grammatical issues. Templeton writes about spelling and the benefit of learning patterns within words to assist in spelling development (p. 104).  One skill that would help D improve his spelling is listening and looking for the patterns (specifically, ending patterns) in words.

Works Cited

Cambourne, B. (1988). An alternate view of learning. In The whole story: Natural learning and the acquisition of literacy in the classroom (pp. 28-42). New York, NY: Ashton Scholastic.

Templeton, S. & Morris, D. (1999). Questions teachers ask about spelling. Reading Research Quarterly, 34(1), 102-112.

Lesson Plan

Objective: Student will become aware of different verb tenses and understand how to write in the past and present tense.

Standards: EALR 3.3.5: Knows and applies writing conventions appropriate for the grade level.  For example, Grade 3: Uses consistent verb tense.

Materials: Pencil and Paper

Instructional Strategies:

Explain the objective of the lesson to the student.

Provide 2 sample paragraphs demonstrating use of the past and present tense when writing a narrative. 

Talk with the student about the differences they notice between the two passages.  Lead the student to some of the key patterns (such as “is” vs. “was” and suffixes such as “ing” and “ed”).

When the student is comfortable recognizing some of these patterns, direct the student to write a paragraph about something he did yesterday. 

Review the paragraph with the student, first having the student read the paragraph aloud, then asking questions to guide the student to make any revisions to verb tense so that everything is consistently in the past-tense. 

When the student is satisfied with his consistent use of the past-tense in his paragraph, direct him to write the same paragraph in the present-tense (as though he were doing yesterday’s activities right now).

Review the paragraph with the student, first having him read the paragraph aloud, then asking questions to guide him to make any necessary revisions.

Bring the lesson to a close by having the student verbally summarize for you the key points from today’s lesson.  Instruct the student to keep these two paragraphs as examples of the past and present tense for his reference.

Assessment: When reviewing this student’s future writing (formally or informally), look for consistent and proper use of the past or present tense. 

Is your kitchen making you fat?

I know what you (might) be thinking!  This is a load of you-know-what.  Well, I thought the same thing, until I watched it.  And, in light of us being teachers, and observing lots of teachers who eat on-the-run or don't eat or have health problems, I think this video is rather apropos.  So, here's to your health and making good eating choices.  Bon appetit!

Tech Post 1: Differentiated Technology

iPod Touches are a fantastic, relatively-affordable way to provide differentiated instruction.  Below are a few ways that I see iPod Touches could be used to help some of the students in my classroom.

For students who are advanced readers, the iPod Touch provides access to an Amazon Kindle app, on which all of the copyright-free classic literature is available for free!  Students will be able to access more literature through this electronic medium than is available at their school (and even local) library.  Also, the iPod Touch has a free app that accesses Dictionary.com, allowing students to look up words quickly and build their vocabulary as they read.  Having access to this literacy-development tool would be purely beneficial as long as students are reading on the iPod Touch at appropriate times during the day.

Many students need a starting place for organizing their responsibilities.  Thus, instead of the soon-to-be "old-fashioned" paper planner, students could use the organizer on the iPod Touch.  They have the options of creating voice memos for themselves, typing brief reminder notes, or using the calendar feature.  For this to be truly effective, the students would need to be issued their own iPod Touch for the year and be responsible for taking it home, charging it, and treating it with care.   The iPod touch offers a great opportunity for students to develop their organization and accountability skills.

The iPod Touch has many free apps that offer reference material, such as math formulas and explanations for how they're used, how they originated, and examples of the formula in action.  These reference materials could be used to help support students who thrive with visual aids.  Also, this kind of iPod Touch tool could help students learn how to make the most of their resources and develop independent learning skills.

The iPod Touch could also be used as a keyboard/typing instrument.  Many students who have physical trouble writing cannot get the assistance they need to scribe, and they do not have access to a computer to type.  If students had iPod Touches, they could use these to assist them in completing assignments which would otherwise require hand-written work.  One disadvantage of using the iPod Touches for this purpose would be that typing is difficult and there is no Word document format for the iPod Touch.  However, using this tool to help students complete work would probably still be more beneficial than having students sit around when the rest of the class is doing hand-written work.

Some students prefer to not speak in front of the whole class to offer their opinion.  Thus, having iPod Touches would provide a way for students to participate in surveys and other real-time problem-solving without having to speak in front of the class.  Ideally, other strategies would be used to help all students feel comfortable sharing their ideas with the class.  However, this is a great interim activity that would help all students participate by using a different medium.

Math Week 2: Manipulating Questions ≠ Questions + Manipulatives

Today, I learned all about the art of questioning.  As math teachers, we should never give answers or tell students that they're right...they'll shut off their brains.  Make students work together to find solutions.  Give them the tools they need to problem-solve and check their own work so that they build confidence in math ability. 

What else did we explore?  Make use of manipulatives whenever possible!  We learn every other subject by starting with concrete information and examples and move to abstract thoughts and concepts.  Why do we teach math the other way around?  So, by using manipulatives as tangible, concrete examples, we can begin to shift math teaching to align with the way the human brain is accustomed to learning.

I'm still wondering about a few theories.  If students rely on the use of manipulatives on tests, then how will they solve the problems on standardized tests?  How do we build a community that doesn't judge a student because they still need to use manipulatives to solve problems?  Also, we can be very "sly" to use tricks like think-pair-share so that students are held accountable for their group members' success, but that still doesn't negate the social issues that middle school students are going through and the feeling that students are at differing abilities if they use different math problem-solving strategies.

Math Week 1: ...Say what?

I love hearing how different people solve math problems!  It always seems that no matter how many different ways you come up with to solve a problem, there are always other people who have figured it out using another method.  In today's class, I learned that we need to build a supportive, patient classroom community so that all of our students are comfortable sharing their mathematical thinking.

I am still questioning the use of cards/randomness to call on students to share their ideas.  I liked the way that this tool was used at the beginning of each activity, to break the ice, and then substituted with "does anyone have a different way of solving this?" so that we didn't see too many repeat answers.  Nevertheless, even though our classroom environment is very supportive, there still seems to be nervousness when it comes to sharing our mathematical thinking with our classmates.

The activities that we did today were extremely engaging and inspired exploration and learning.  This type of activity will be a great tool to use in our future math classrooms.  The bonus is that these activities truly cover all of the state standards!